Complete Tosh.com

This last bit of the MBA is, like many, heavy on heavy models and theoretical underpinning, as you’d expect. But through this abstract fog occasionally shines a particularly relevant bit of research that pulls dozens of strands of thought together.

Smith and Reinersten’s The Fuzzy Front End is such a bit of work. Put simply, it’s the theory that, during development of a new product, the time to rush is not at the end (during “crunch mode”) but right at the start. Yep – the time to really put the foot down, the time when hurrying up is going to have maximum impact and save the most money, is right at the point you’re sucking on your pipe, metaphorical or otherwise, and saying: “maybe we should do…. this“.

Why do we take our time at this point? First, early on there are no traditional managerial “handles” on the process – no schedule, budget or objective. You can’t deviate, after all, from a plan you do not yet have.

Second, at this stage managers aren’t giving the new idea their full attention; the idea has no financial impact attached to it, because it’s unlikely anyone’s worked out the full benefit of delivery, and nobody has been devoted to it (thus incurring costs). Good managers focus on big bills, not small ones, right?

But, say Smith and Reinersten, we’ve got it all wrong. Massively, expensively, wrong.

“In fact, the true cost of this phase is usually many times higher than managers suspect. In this phase the most important influence on cost is the cost of delay, not of the manpower assigned to the project. The calculated cost is often 500 to 5000 times higher than the visible costs of the assigned personnel. Managers unaware of these costs will tend to ignore the ‘fuzzy front end’. Those who understand these costs will instead focus a great deal of attention on this phase.

[...]

The front end offers some of the cheapest opportunities to cut development time that are to be found anywhere in the cycle.”

So hurry up and decide what to do, and then do it now.

[Postscript: interesting to note that, amid contemporary enthusiasms for Getting Real and the rest, Smith and Reinersten first published their book in 1991. It's also faintly disappointing that the course expects us to take a long, hard look at PRINCE methodology which - it seems - front-loads the fuzzy front end with planning and bulks up the rest of the development process with the need to document, control and approve. In this more Agile age, it all seems a bit backward. A little startup could build and launch in the time it takes the biggie to gather together the first PRINCE end stage assessment, and do the PowerPoints.]

Interesting stuff to report from the last bit of my MBA, which I’m revising this week for an exam on Tuesday (last one! After three and a half stricken years! Yay!).

The module is all about tech management, and the course material strongly supports the thought that media companies will have to become as adept at managing technology as they are producing content if they’re to thrive.

The very first page of the first book of the course uses the newspaper industry as the prime example of how technology management binds general management with traditional science and engineering.

“Printing by moveable type was among civilisation’s best inventions, but latterly newspaper trades failed to innovate. Industrial practices based on craft skills and division of labour gave virtual control to the various trade unions. General management was not only unable to bring in new technology, it remained ignorant of the possibilities… even when management did update, it was often to ‘old’ new technology, such as systems using mainframe computers. Such systems, fully developed to the point of obsolescence, failed to link the end-point objectives of management with technological opportunities; managers were technically ignorant, and hence gullible.

[...]

Technological and business changes in the newspaper [now] cover every aspect, from news gathering to the return of unsold copies. Newspapers are a combination of service (news) and manufacturing (newspapers), but even at the heart of “pure” manufacturing, in metal working industries no less, an observer pinpoints the ‘competitive need to make the right technological choices for the business’ (Probert et al., 2000).

The technology management experts who drew up this course clearly know their onions, so it’s fascinating – if slightly terrifying – to see that, of all the industries in all the world, they picked the newspaper business as the one they’d use first, to highlight the point of their course.

Newspaper industry insiders, as well as close observers, may reflect that industries under much less immediate threat already have a more enlightened, informed view of where technology and its management sits in their business; right at the heart, as a core competence.

But there are bits of this industry still grappling with the worth of blogs (or even simply being online). In the US, they’ve only just got around to the notion – reluctantly – that their most famous newspaper awards should also include online work. See that, and you know there’s a way to go yet.

With the start of the next MBA module only weeks away, it’s time to get back in the saddle. Ahoy, FT.

And, by luck, there’s an interesting wee piece (paid sub reqd) in Creative Business by Giles Lury, a partner at HPI Research Group.

“Most new products fail,” he notes, so his company has come up with a take on the seven deadly sins that, if sidestepped, give your new product a fighting chance of not becoming “another Radion”…

Pride You can believe in your baby too much, so outside eyes (he, unsurprisingly, suggests a “good research agency”) might offer some constructive criticism.

Envy “Good enough is not enough” – your new product has got to be better, cheaper or different – or all three. Don’t do “me too”.

Gluttony You can stretch a brand too far.

Lust Go for the discerning minority, not the mass of fickle followers.

Anger If a competitor arrives on your turf, don’t get angry – get better.

Greed Don’t trim specifications to improve margins. Preserve the integrity of the original concept (this seems to clash a little with pride, but he’s meaning that you preserve the integrity of the concept post-research).

Trendsetters.com highlights “time compression” as a new thing. Of course, we’ve been muttering darkly about the speeding up of the world for some time, but Michael Tchong (Trendscape’s founder) gathers together some interesting examples of how the world is speeding up. Better still – and setting this apart from the more common, technocratic view of emerging trends – he illustrates how this is changing the business landscape. Some highlights…

“No time to sleep — In the 1920s, the average U.S. adult slept 8.8 hours each day. By 2001 that figure had declined to 6.8, fully two hours less, according to the NIH. Even infants now average almost 90 minutes less sleep a day than the 14-hour minimum doctors recommend, according to the National Sleep Foundation.
No time to eat or cook — Fully 59% of all U.S. meals are rushed and 34% of lunches are eaten on the run, according to National Eating Trends, a trend fueled by the $112 billion U.S. fast-food business. The share of dinners that came from takeout or a grocery freezer increased by 24% in the past decade, and is likely to overtake meals made from scratch in five years, predicts The NPD Group. According to the James Beard Foundation, when cream of wheat was introduced in 1893, it took 15 minutes to prepare. By 1939, it was five minutes. Now, it takes just 30 seconds.
No time for music — The first performances of “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” Wagner’s “Ring,” took an average of 14 hours and 20 minutes from 1876 to 1950. After 1960, the tempo increased and it took about 14 hours. The last complete performance by Hartmut Haenchen in 1998 took 13 hours and 30 minutes, nearly one hour less.

But my favourite is his comments on the growth of multitasking which (in another post on the same page) he highlights as being a particular characteristic of “generation y” – those born after 1978. Multitasking, he says, “is behind a phenomenon dubbed ‘surfer’s voice,’ that absent-minded voice you hear on the phone, accompanied by a clicking keyboard, which suggests your party is perhaps answering e-mail or, worse, involved in an online chat.”

And so to sunny Crewe (actually completely bloody freezing, and cloudy), for a weekend of Open Uni Business School strategy stuff. We’re housed in a modern conference centre/hotel/golf course affair – the kind of place they film a lot of Footballers’ Wives, or Dream Team. Very modern, all very clean, big meandering drive with perfect tarmac and speed bumps, turf mowed in little lines, lots of clean chrome and laminates… all with just a little hint of… bling.

In other news, it may say something slightly worrying about my mental condition that I’m quite looking forward to two solid days of picking the bones out of the strategies of Save the Children, the Accor hotel chain and Amazon.com. The latter is, of course, particularly entertaining for me: it hurtles me back to the headiest days of the dot.com boom, and includes a list of the company’s investments from around 1999 or so. Since that list includes the like of Webvan, the discussion on investment strategy could be very interesting indeed.

It’s rare that anything in an MBA textbook makes me laugh out loud, frankly. Porter’s five forces, good ol’ Lancaster and Massingham – all nice chaps, I’m sure, probably a scream down the pub, but their academic stuff isn’t chuckle-a-minute material. But one exhibit, in Robert Grant’s Contemporary Strategy Analysis did the trick, even if the laugh was a pretty cynical, weary one.

“UST Inc. (formerly US Tobacco) has the distinction of earning the highest return on equity of any company in the Fortune 500 listings (over 100 percent over the period 1995-99). UST dominates the US market for “smokeless tobacco” (chewing tobacco and snuff) with a market share of 78%… despite its association with a bygone era of cowboys and rural poverty, chewing tobacco has been a growth market over the past two decades with a surprisingly large number of young customers. UST’s long established brands, its distribution through tens of thousands of small retail outlets and the unwillingness of major tobacco companies to enter this market (due to the poor image and social unacceptability of the product) have supported the company’s unassailable market position. Federal controls on the advertising of smokeless tobacco products introduced in 1986 have buttressed UST’s market position by limiting the opportunities for would-be entrants to market their products”.
(from a Standard and Poor’s stock report)

Chaps, maybe it’s time to rethink this advertising ban stuff…